Talk:Archibald Maule Ramsay

Reference required

is there a reference for this dubious statement "if Kent had given his stolen documents to Ramsay, it would have been impossible to prevent their publication, which could have stopped immediate escalation of war. At the time this was antithetical to the controllers of parliament."? If there is no reliable reference for this statement, then it is POV. Giacomo Returned 20:37, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

That's a sentence of mine (or my assistant) followed by what I think is a rather dubious sentence of another ('the controllers of Parliament' carries a rather disturbing odour). The first sentence could, I think, be clarified by saying that this was what was in the mind of the authorities: Ramsay, who had Parliamentary privilege (so any speech of his could be reported without restriction), could have read out the copied cables in the House of Commons.

One useful source is a BBC Newsnight piece from 1982, when Robert Harris (then a broadcast journalist, now a famous author) tracked down an elderly Tyler Kent and interviewed him. This interview was the centrepiece of a 24 minute report on the whole Ramsay/Kent case which fortunately you can watch on Adam Curtis' BBC blog: Wicked leaks. Perhaps the section starting just before nine minutes in is the one which goes directly to the issue of the likely effects of the cables being published; at 14 minutes in, Kent talks about Capt Ramsay in general terms. Then at 17:22, he is asked "Did he (Ramsay) intend to do anything with the material?" Kent's answer is "Well yes, the whole idea was that it was (he was) thinking about bringing it up in Parliament".

Richard Griffiths' "Patriotism Perverted" (Constable, 1998), in effect if not in name a biography of Ramsay, explains the motivations on page 261 through the beliefs of Kent: "Kent believed Ramsay intended to use these documents to expose the Churchill-Roosevelt conspiracy in Parliament". Robin Thurlow in "Fascism in Britain" (I.B. Tauris, my edition is 1998 though there are others), on page 164, says directly "if Kent published his material in a pro-isolationist publication in the United States, or Maule Ramsay asked a question about it in the British Parliament, there was a real possibility that the secretly pro-interventionist Roosevelt would not be re-elected and that Churchill's government would fall". Sam Blacketer (talk) 22:33, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

• Thank you for explaining. That's very interesting and I think it would be a good idea if that was explained and referenced in the article a little more clearly. I find the the pre-war and early war-time views of certian sections of British society towards Nazi Germany fascinating, I'm sure many others do too. So a few more notes and references would be realy helpful. Giacomo Returned 07:42, 5 April 2011 (UTC)